The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (7 page)

threats. Although the Senate barred them from moving troops outside their provinces without permission, many found the temptation

to enrich themselves through self-serving wars irresistible.

Before 150 b.c., the Romans ruled only Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia,

and Spain directly. Although unapologetic conquerors, they were

also deft practitioners of soft power. When possible, Rome preferred

to exert infl uence through semiautonomous client kings whom the

Senate euphemistically termed “friends of the Roman people.” Putting aside their avowed disdain for kings, senators bestowed ivory

scepters, embroidered togas, and other markers of Etruscan royalty

on puppet rulers as symbols of their allegiance to Rome. More signifi cantly, the Romans often helped cooperative monarchs remain in

power with direct payments of coins and material goods. Acceptance

of these royal trappings and subsidies signifi ed that an ally deferred

to imperial authority, and the Romans interpreted any defi ance of

their will as an overt revolt. They also intervened freely in local succession disputes to replace unsuitable clients.

In the Greek portions of the empire, many city-states were so

cooperative that imperial administration was not a problem. But in

most other conquered territories the governors and their tiny staffs

needed local help to collect taxes and maintain order. In the west,

where there were fewer useful centralized institutions of authority, the Romans encouraged their creation by rewarding cooperative

allies with citizenship. The Romans also engaged in formal colonization by settling former soldiers in veterans’ colonies and providing

land grants to citizens and allies.

While tribute from client states and provincial taxes poured new

riches into Rome, the imperial windfall had an enormous hidden cost.

The common farmers, who made up the backbone of the early republican armies, faced bankruptcy because they could not compete with

cheap grain from Sicily and Spain. Many gravitated to the city of

Rome to take advantage of the free grain ration after wealthy and

connected families bought up their lands. This urban poor became a

dangerous rabble ready to support any conquering hero who promised to feed and entertain them.

32 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Powerful proconsuls such as Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar played

to the mob and turned their legions into private armies by using imperial plunder to reward soldiers with pensions and land grants. Having

gained suffi cient strength and fame in the provinces, they marched

on Rome in a bid for absolute power. Imperial plunder thus had a

corrupting and corrosive impact on the republic. Countless problems

affl icted the late Roman Republic, but Caesar’s rise stemmed from the

inability of its representative institutions to incorporate its far-fl ung

provinces and this was a key factor in its demise. The slow transmission of orders and messages in the ancient world gave Roman generals and governors far too much power and autonomy, and the Senate

failed to fi nd a way to balance Rome’s representative institutions with

the inherent tyranny of imperial rule in the provinces.

Julius Caesar’s murder at the hands of the Senate in 44 b.c. appeared

to reaffi rm Rome’s republican values, but it paved the way for the rise

of his adopted son and heir, Octavian, who took the name Augustus

Caesar after coming to power in 31 b.c. Four years later, Augustus

made a show of giving up the dictatorial powers he had assumed during the struggle for power. The citizenry of Rome still elected consuls

and other lesser magistrates, but Augustus effectively brought the

republic to an end. He made himself a tribune for life, which gave him

the power to veto legislation and made his person sacred. Augustus

thus had absolute power over the city of Rome and its empire. He did

not claim to be a god during his lifetime, but by sanctioning the Senate’s deifi cation of his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, he established his

divine lineage. Adding the title
imperator
, an honorifi c that soldiers

voted to victorious generals, Augustus fi nally gave Rome an emperor

to go with its de facto empire (the principate). With a population of

forty million people, four million of whom were citizens, the Roman

Empire reached the height of its power under his despotic rule.

Facing few serious foreign threats, Augustus and the Julio-Claudian

emperors who succeeded him focused on securing virtually all of the

agriculturally productive regions of Europe and the Mediterranean

borderlands. They pushed imperial boundaries to their natural frontiers at mountain ranges, dense forests, deserts, and impassable bodies

of water. There was no formal line on a map marking the conclusive

limits of Roman territory. Rather, the Romans bounded the empire

with a network of roads, forts, and alliances with client kings.

Roman

Britain 33

Persia’s Parthian Empire was the principate’s only signifi cant rival

foreign power. But the “barbarians” of the west also became a serious

problem. It was the ambush and annihilation of three legions (fi fteen

thousand men) by northern Germans in the Teutoburg Forest in a.d.

9 that cooled the aging Augustus’s enthusiasm for further empire

building. The massacre drove home the reality that the incorporation

of unwilling frontier peoples was rarely worth the cost. Nonetheless,

the republican civil wars demonstrated that successful generals were

a much greater political threat.

Augustus had no direct male heir and left no formal system of succession, which meant most Julio-Claudians came to power through

adoption by their predecessors and the support of powerful allies in

the military. It was the Praetorian Guard who elevated Claudius to

the imperial throne by assassinating Caligula. While Claudius was

a reasonably moderate ruler, his adopted son and heir, Nero, was so

brutal and incompetent that powerful provincial governors drove him

to suicide in a.d. 68. The empire then lapsed into civil war as various

military leaders competed for the imperial purple. Order returned in

a.d. 69 when Vespasian, who had distinguished himself during the

Claudian conquest of Britain and the Jewish revolt, came to power.

The members of his Flavian dynasty and the following “fi ve good

emperors” ranged from enlightened despots to tyrants, but they presided over a century of stability and prosperity that Gibbon and later

historians romanticized as Rome’s golden age.

The Roman imperial administrative system came to full maturity

under the Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties, but the actual reach

of the emperors was short. Lacking the technology to issue immediate and direct orders, they relied on small personal staffs of slaves

and freedmen, trustworthy aristocrats, and a relatively small clerical

bureau to govern the empire. A formal bureaucracy did not develop

until early in the third century a.d. The Senate retained authority

over the Italian peninsula, and senatorial governors also commanded

garrisons in the peaceful territories. The emperor’s own men, who

were often equestrians (second-rank aristocrats), controlled legions

in frontier provinces. In most cases, their headquarters’ staffs provided the core of the administration. The emperors made law by

sending directives to provincial offi cials and responding to petitions

from their subjects. In their capacity as magistrates, governors relied

34 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

on Roman law in adjudicating cases involving Romans and followed

local precedent for lesser proceedings concerning noncitizens.

At the local level the actual mechanics of government varied widely.

Whenever possible, a city became the center of imperial administration because urban populations were the easiest to police and tax.

The Romans ruled through long-established city-states in the Greek

east, but Roman offi cials had to actively promote urbanization in the

western provinces. Imperial rule turned Spanish village communes

into formal cities with the rights of Roman citizenship (
municipia
)

and encouraged Gauls and Britons to abandoned fortifi ed strongholds

for new Roman-style towns. As in the city of Rome, urban populations elected governing magistrates from among the most wealthy

and infl uential members of the community, and these civil leaders

carried the burden of funding municipal operations. The emperors

also continued the republican practice of using veterans’ colonies to

create islands of Roman infl uence among conquered populations.

Governing the vast rural majority was more complicated. In the

western provinces, the Romans created the semblance of
civitates
by

lending money to community leaders to build capitals on the Roman

model. These anchored the administration of the surrounding countryside, and over time, many of their respectable classes became leading citizens of the empire.

The army was also a powerful instrument of assimilation under

the principate. Composed of long-serving professional soldiers who

were mostly volunteers, its base shifted from the Italian peninsula

to the provinces. Many of the principal recruits were the sons of

legionnaires from army camps in Spain, North Africa, and southern

Gaul, but others were auxiliaries drawn from subject communities

throughout the empire. The later Roman army had almost as many

auxiliary troops as it did regular Roman legionnaires, which lowered

the costs of imperial rule considerably. The Romans also disciplined

troublesome subjects by impressing them into ethnically based specialist units such as archers and light cavalrymen. German auxiliaries

from Batavia staged a signifi cant revolt in a.d. 69, but most subject

troops earned their Roman citizenship on discharge. Imperial military offi cials spread thousands of these romanized veterans throughout the empire. In both cases, they constituted a substantial prop to

Roman imperial rule.

Roman

Britain 35

The empire’s subjects bore primary responsibility for supporting

this 250,000-man standing army and the emperor’s vast personal

household. The steady fl ow of imperial loot and extortion meant that

citizens faced little in the way of direct taxes until late in the third

century a.d. In terms of currency alone, the republic minted roughly

fi fty tons of silver coinage per year in its fi nal decades, the equivalent

of half of the silver the Spanish imported from the Americas in the

sixteenth century a.d.13 Demands for revenue fell most heavily on

subject communities living along the empire’s network of roads, but

over time the imperial tax system captured a greater swath of the

rural population as it became more established and effi cient.

Metropolitan Rome and the Italian heartland were at the center of a ring of prosperous provinces consisting of Spain, southern

Gaul, North Africa, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt. These wealthy

territories, particularly in the east, funneled tax revenues to the

imperial core. Egypt and the African provinces also provided most

of the free grain for the city of Rome. Plunder aside, Britain and the

other outer provinces actually contributed comparatively little to

the metropolitan treasury, with the bulk of their resources going to

support military garrisons on the frontiers. Over time, Roman rule

gradually transformed the local economies of these outlying territories as revenue demands, military purchases, and free-spending

legionnaires stimulated trade and promoted the development of

provincial markets.

There are no surviving records of general tax rates under the principate, which means historians disagree on whether Roman demands

on their subjects were light or burdensome. At the very least, Roman

subjects paid a personal tax and a land tax. Wealthier men also paid

indirect levies on inheritances, houses, slaves, ships, and other forms

of property and commerce. The republic delegated direct taxation in

Greece and Gaul to private companies that paid for the right to collect

taxes in a given region. In order to extract more revenue than they

had to turn over to the state, these companies were often quite predatory. The principate ended some of the worst tax-farming abuses,

but its improved effi ciency in keeping track of the general population through censuses probably offset savings that taxpayers might

have gained from escaping the clutches of corrupt private collectors.

Romanized urban elites most likely accepted payment in agricultural

36 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

produce that could be sold to generate the coinage demanded by the

imperial treasury.

Aristocrats in Rome and the central provinces were the ultimate

benefi ciaries of this comparatively effi cient extractive system. These

were the senatorial and equestrian classes, which constituted less than

1 percent of the total imperial population. Senators, who numbered

six hundred under the early principate, owned vast rural estates that

made them the wealthiest men in the empire. Some also dabbled in

moneylending, but the equestrian class, which took its name from the

cavalrymen of the early republic, were the empire’s most prominent